In the Popular Science Monthly for October 1881, Mr. J. Stahl Patterson, in an article on the “Movement of the Colored Population,” says:  “It would seem that in the industrial aspects of the case the white and colored men may be, under certain circumstances, the complement of each other.”  Again:  “There are two distinct classes of colored economists.  One is satisfied with dependence on others for employment, the other affects independent homes, and struggles to secure them, however humble.  Some even acquire wealth.”

In the same monthly for February, 1883, Prof.  E.W.  Gilliam has a long article on the “African in the United States,” in which he does all he can to make wider the breach between the blacks and the whites.  He has very little good to say of the black man.  But he was forced to make the following admissions, viz: 

“The blacks are an improving race, and the throb of aspiration is quickening. * * * Advancement in mental training and in economic science must needs be slow but there is advancement.”

The learned professor makes the interesting calculation that the blacks in the Southern States will increase from 6,000,000 in 1880, to 192,000,000, in 1980; while the whites in the South, in 1880, 12,000,000, will number only 96,000,000, in 1980.  The learned professor infers that this vast army will be “doomed to remain where they have been, and be hewers of wood and drawers of water,” because they form a “distinct alien race.”  I think, if the professor will wait until 1980, he will find that this “alien race,” which profligate white men have done and are doing so much to amalgamate with their own race, will not only increase approximately as he has figured it out, in numbers, but in wealth as well.

The future landlord and capitalist of the South are no longer confined to the white race:  the black man has become a factor, and he must be counted.

CHAPTER XV

The Land Problem

The ownership of land in the South is the same pernicious thing it has come to be in every civilized country in the world.  Instead of being, as it was intended to be, a blessing to the people, it is the crying curse which takes precedence of all other evils that afflict mankind.  And the cause is not far to seek.  Land is, in its very nature, the common property of the people.  Like air and water, it is one of the natural elements which inhere in man as a common right, and without which life could in no wise be sustained.  A man must have air, or he will suffocate; he must have water, or he will perish of thirst; he must have access to the soil, for upon it grow those things which nature intended for the sustentation of the physical man, and without which he cannot live.  Deprive me of pure fresh air, and I die; deprive me of pure fresh water, and I die; deprive me of free opportunity to earn my bread by the sweat of my brow, by sowing in the sowing time